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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that Intel producing the iPhone chip was ever likely to happen - sure Jobs had to ask Intel as a courtesy for a partner but it was never realistic.

- Arm has dominated low power / mobile segment from well before the iPhone due to its superior power consumption;

- The non Arm IP (eg Imagination GPU) was also important and it was unlikely that Intel would have been integrated that on their SoCs.

I had an Atom tablet from the time when Intel supposedly had competitive mobile SoCs and it really wasn't a great device - ran hot and very short battery life.

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The first Atom SoCs used an Imagination GPU.

Interesting - and I stand corrected - thanks.

> I had an Atom tablet [...] and it really wasn't a great device - ran hot and very short battery life.

In all honesty the implementation and OS also matter. Most Atom tablets weren't particularly great (or even good) devices overall. And running Windows on a contemporary ARM SoC wouldn't have resulted in a better experience.

It was Android and much, much worse than contemporary Arm tablets.

Most Atom tablets I've ever seen were very bad implementations from noname brands, I haven't seen a halo product. And the OS choice was worse, either a full Windows, or an x86 Android, neither of which is the best choice for such a device. And that's on top of any weakness the CPU itself may have.

I've got one of those Bay Trail tablets. Its crippled memory bandwidth destroys performance, torpedoes battery (race to sleep).

Apple tends to emphasize memory bandwidth in its own designs.

Apple was also one of the first investors in Arm and one of the reasons the original company Acorn existed.

Acorn existed fully independently of Apple. Check out the history of the BBC Micro and its forebears.

Apple came on the scene later, when Acorn had developed the ARM processor. You're right that they were an original investor in the spinout company.

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